Ever since Lemony Snicket began to document the trials and tribulations of the unfortunate Baudelaire orphans in the first book "The Bad Beginning," concerned parents have worried that these morbidly depressing accounts might be upsetting to their own innocent children.
This popular book series -- now a box-office-smash movie -- is consistently gloomy and pessimistic, describing the world as a dangerous place filled with distracted adults who never listen to the anguished concerns of their mortally imperiled young.
Which is exactly why children love "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events." They know it's not a kid's movie. It's a documentary.
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I was going to get the books for me ma for Christmas, but then I found out that Lemony Snicket is a very prodigious man and has written ELEVEN books. The sum total would've been close to a hundred and thirty bucks, which is in the jewlery range, and if I was going to spend jewlery money, I would've already bought her jewlery. So I got her the first three to see if she'll like them.
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quote:Why is the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" the bad guy, anyway? After all, the kids did break into her gingerbread house and in Florida she's allowed to use lethal force if they eat their way over the threshold. I just assumed she was on a really strict Atkins.
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Column extras: two examples I cut out, partly because I was out of room and partly because they weren't really instructive, just annoying to me.
First, it's not a fairy tale, but it's very disturbing: "Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie/ kissed the girls and made them cry/ when the boys came out to play/ Georgie Porgie ran away." This is a sex offender waiting to happen.
And the one that really gets me, "The Princess and the Pea." Bad enough that it reinforces unrealistic expectations, or that it implies that only inhumanly sensitive, high-born ladies are worthy to marry, but can you imagine sleeping with a woman who can feel a pea beneath forty mattresses? I’m guessing that crumbs in bed are not an option in this relationship. It would be like marrying one of those little inbred dogs that shakes and pees all the time.
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Awesome Chris! My son quite likes those books.
Hey book, why not get her just the first few? Then for her birthday, the next three...that's what we do with series.
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dkw and I have been perusing a collection of Hans Christian Andersen stories. They are really quite horrid from almost any perspective one would care to name. Poorly written. Narrative flow that doesn't. One dimensional characters.
But the worst part of all is that most of the "take home" lessons are just awful.
Things like: If your mother dies, it's your fault and if you don't behave properly to the mean people in your life, someone will have to chop off your feet, you selfish little brat.
Criminy!
I mean, really, this guy HATED children. He must have.
Another sample moral: Don't wish for anything other than what you have RIGHT NOW because if you do, it'll turn out badly and you'll end up in the attic drying out until someone finally throws you outside and uses you for target practice.
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But I always thought the message of The Little Mermaid (not the Disney version, the orginal story) was: if you give up your home, essence, and family for a man, you will die.
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With the unbound success of "Wicked" I think there is a good story out there about the South Beach diet obsessed elderly woman who turns her house of carbs into a house of high protien, only to be eaten herself by a gang of maurading abandoned children.
Mrs. M. What does Ariel do to attract her man? She spreads her legs for the first time, quite literally. I wrote a poem about a high school Ariel who returned to the sea forever after trying her new legs spread for the first time in a useless attempt to get her prince.
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Best column yet and that's saying something!
I have always had some problems with the popular fairy tales for the reasons you mention.
Though, to be fair - Aladdin did discover (in the Disneyfied version anyway) that material things didn't make him happy.
One reason I loved Belle as a Disney heroine is she didn't sit back on her butt and wait for someone to rescue her - she gets herself out of a locked cellar and heads off the rescue the beast.
All in all though, this is definitely one of my favorites of your columns! Bravo.
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That was great Chris! Totally true!
